


Interlude: The Naughtsden Curse

by Reera the Red (nimmieamee)



Series: Notes from the Wizarding World [13]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-15
Updated: 2014-02-15
Packaged: 2018-01-12 13:02:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1186554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/Reera%20the%20Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gather round and I will tell you of the fall of the house of Nott.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Upwards of seventy years ago, in a fine old castle called Naughtsden, lived Cantankerus Nott. He was even then elderly-to-prehistoric. He had mammoth bones and long, gruesome-seeming fingers with long nails; his hair was thick and white, his features thin, and his pale skin sagged all around his small lips and dripped down with patrician age from his high brow.

He strode through life as an aging dragon or dinosaur, too forceful for every room, too domineering for any conversation, upsetting nearly everyone around him. But this was permitted, this was quite alright. He was to receive no comeuppance for sacking sniveling Abbott who married a Muggleborn, for ousting round little Longbottom and his tall fierce wife from their offices, for discrediting weak-wristed Professor Turpin’s work on the complete irrelevance of blood. Nott could do all this and more and suffer no consequences, for he was a pillar of society. He upheld the old ways. He believed fiercely in the superiority of the magical world. So his age was believed to confer wisdom, his blood seen as spotless, his imperious frame called regal, his stretched skin considered classic, his harsh lip a sign of impeccable breeding. 

He had a godson and protege, one Geoffrey Shacklebolt.

How handsome and powerful Shacklebolt was! Young, with quick duelist’s wrists and clear dark skin and a talent for the most difficult Dark spells, to boot. The son of the son of the son of a slave, it was true, but then the slave had been magical, and had descended (it was proven by testing the blood, a messy and painful process using spider-pincers that we outlaw today) from very very great chieftains of a properly magical variety. And this showed. Shacklebolt had stunning promise and ability, though he was perhaps, thought Nott, a touch too easygoing, a touch too genial, a touch too kind to his inferiors — a perfect mooncalf, really. Nott adored and indulged him as one would a son, for Nott had only nephews himself, and each more dull and weak than the last. But he still took a firm hand when he had to, for Shacklebolt was prone to verse and alcohol and theater and clever dancing women with laughter like bells, and Shacklebolt did not care if the verse was Muggle poetry, the alcohol goblin-made, the theater subversive and sick, or the women werewolves.

Silly boy!

He gave Nott such frights, but loved him true, until—

Until Miss Jenny Jinks. Oh, how dreadful she was. A Muggleborn girl. And not a Hogwarts girl. From some newfangled school out in the United States, some charity place built on pureblood money, Cantakerus was sure, for  _her_  sort didn’t have money of their own. But built for very muddy sorts. She claimed it was worth forty Hogwartses. She would. She was the ignorant daughter of some uneducated yokel, after all, and so wicked, so plotting! She stuffed Shacklebolt’s head with nonsense.

He would say, “ _Don’t_  you care about magical society, though, Jenny? My Uncle Nott is awfully concerned with keeping it safe and pure, you know.”

And she would pour him another drink, and wink, and say, “ _This_  tiny corner of the universe? Not one bit.”

And he would say, “Now, we’ve got a lot here. We’ve got the Ministry and some fine Quidditch teams and there’s Hogwarts—”

And she would say, dismissively, “And that’s all you care about. But the world’s bigger than that.”

For how could a creature so impure care about preserving their world? She could not. So of course she very carelessly upset the match Nott was carefully orchestrating between godson Shacklebolt and dear goddaughter Walburga Black (then ten, but quite ready for engagement, Nott thought). Yes, Jenny Jinks was unheeding, selfish. And for this? Nott believed she deserved an upset. 

It was common and legal, in those days, to mix Amortentia with the little Western flower magical maidens call love-in-idleness. In this fashion, any young and foolish wizard, caught by some tempting bit of filth, might see their eye directed gently elsewhere. A godfatherly Puck might save a foolish boy from making a grave mistake.  _Might_.

Nine times out of ten. 

Alas, this proved to be the one time such a formula could not succeed. True Love! Amortentia’s obsession is no replacement for that. And in fact every dose seemed only to remind Shacklebolt of his Muggleborn, for in it he smelled not proper pumpkin tea but clove cigarettes, not bewitchingly girlish tadpole powder but Mitsouko perfume. So Shacklebolt snuffed out the plot, uncovered the whole scheme. Such a scheme, to a foolish young man, is high treason: a betrayal by his well-meaning elders. The worst, more appalling betrayal. So, pained and heartsick, Shacklebolt cast Nott off. For his dark-skinned, black-eyed Muggleborn, he rebuffed Nott. Nott who was so dear to him, who he’d loved not because of blood, but by a faithful appointment of the soul.

For his part, Nott believed the union would not last (“I’ll keep you in the Twenty-eight for when the marriage goes sour, my boy!”), but it did. The separation lasted as well, and with it came many a sleepless night for Shacklebolt, much heartache, for by choosing truest love he had lost a father. He longed to be happy, but he could not be, not quite, and though within the year he’d sired a son, a very strong one, within two or three he had died.

Wizards and witches can be beautiful and powerful and pure, with duelist’s wrists and strong frames and flashing eyes. But know this: they find it hard to cast off a broken heart. This is the trade-off. This is the price of being born so regal and well-bred. There is a silly, foolish propensity for sickness in them. The more superstitious say that when nonsense magic has been trapped too long inside the blood, it needs an outlet, and it begins to bubble up in odd quirks and fits of overpowering heartache.

So Geoffrey died.

Now, Jenny did not believe this was right. She had to watch her husband struggle and die. And then she also saw, by contrast, Cantankerus Nott regally striding about, shoving aside goblin in Diagon and spitting on Muggleborn in the Ministry, perfectly content in spite of all the evils he committed, never punished, no comeuppance in sight.

Oh, but a very clever, very angry witch can  _make_  a comeuppance, if there is none to be found. 

So she did. None are sure of exactly how she did it. Nott would come to believe it a unique Comeuppance  _Potion,_ something she’d somehow managed to magic into his tea, with a smattering, here, of bat’s wings, and there some blood gathered by blood pincer, and a drop of her blasted Muggle perfume, and — oh, surely — some love-in-idleness to cap it off. But she never confirmed this. She only appeared at his Ministry office one day, in short skirts with a beaded hat and a Muggle coat, and she said, “Someday, Sir,” though Ms. Jenny Shacklebolt had no reason to call him Sir, excepting that she believed politeness made a curse all the sweeter, for she was a bit of a Southern belle like that, “Someday, through love and in spite of wickedness, your name will mean nothing, and your heirs will be quite as good as mine.”

Do you know? She said it so kindly that one might have thought she was conveying a blessing, not a curse. Nott spat out, “What are you saying? You shameless creature! Parading yourself in here, casting aspersions on my heirs and blood—”

"I don’t care about your heirs and blood," said Jenny. "I don’t care one little bit. I care about a world a bit grander and greater than that. So I bless you, you stupid old fossil. I bless you. May your work someday culminate in something greater than you, greater than your blood, greater than your stupid little world."

And this was the cruelest curse she could have laid on a creature like Cantankerus Nott.


	2. Chapter 2

Old Cantankerus was cursed. A fairy with shingled hair did it, a sibyl smoking clove cigarettes. The dark twinkle in her eye, the calm laughter curled in the corner of her mouth, her general manner of conveying a blessing as she cursed him — all this struck fear into old Nott’s heart.

He called down to the DoM to confirm that it was, indeed, an ominous moment. It was. It had been. The fairy disappeared, along with her son, to some far-flung section of the Isles behind powerful wards. But the curse on the Notts was in place. They now had an orb, pulsing away in the bowels of the Department, signaling their doom. 

Nott was in a panic.

He reasoned that his heirs right  _now_  were perfectly decent. They believed the right sort of things, they made the right sort of friends — even that, that little Tommy Question, that younger year with the odd background but the very clever aspect. But now they had prophecy against them, poor boys. And them so dull and weak! It could not be borne. Nott had to protect them, to keep them from being touched by the filthy evil that he was now sure danced around the edges of their family. 

So he did protect them. If before he had been committed to keeping his blood pure, keeping his world pure, now he became fairly obsessed. It was as though he’d been doused by his own twisted love potion and had his senses clouded. He paid off officials when the boys engaged in high-spirited cursing of their inferiors, to make sure they loved him and would obey him above all. He purchased several pure-blooded and decorative wives for them, each more genteelly Muggle-hating than the last. He researched Darker and Darker protection charms, layering them over his house and home, making old Naughtsden an impenetrable fortress atop a small mountain, a place of doom and gloom, but also quite secure against incursions by Muggle filth.

"I bless this house," he said fervently, laying terrible curses over the foundations.

"I bless this blood!" he screeched each night, summoning horrible creatures to scare off the Muggles.

"I bless this world!" he thundered, planting awful surprises in every corner and above each cornice.

He turned their old mountain den into a fairy palace of horrors, to complement their cursed state. He made it, quite unwittingly, Bluebeard’s den, a prison atop the glass mountain, a storybook lair.

Then he died. It was just before the First Rise. His heirs would take part in the Rise with grim satisfaction, but he would not see them do so; he would leave the earth just then still terrified, slightly unhinged, warning them never to let their guard down when it came to impurities of the blood. And they did not. Here is what became of them: the first, Azkaban and death in a cell; the second, struck down by Alastor Moody; the third, a miserable and gloomy life in the old house, stuffed between an unhappy son and a dying (then dead) decorative wife, until he too was sent to Azkaban, this time after the second rise.

The son, Cantankerus’s great-nephew, was found guilty of believing too much in purity of the blood. Also Dark Magic. His wand was stripped, his rights were stripped, and he would have been thrown in Azkaban as well, but for the grace of the Minister, Shacklebolt.

"Leave and don’t come back," Shacklebolt advised, taking into account Theodore Nott’s young age, his relatively low number of crimes, and the enormous backload of trials the MLE had to deal with. "Take a position abroad somewhere. I’m sure you have friends who can help you."

And in fact he did. The prophecy was not yet complete; the Nott name still had some worth. There were large, imposing men in Parisian salons who railed against what was happening to a boy from such a good family; there were fans of Cantankerus’s policies in Venetian palaces who  _lived_  to offer a home to such a fashionably well-bred refugee. So for a time he floated through Europe, Theodore Nott. He found another wand. He attended theaters and dance halls and mingled even with goblins and Muggleborns, depressed and lonely, a thin and unhappy presence who swore he could smell, in every mug, the dank and homey gloom of England, which he could never return to. 

For you see he loved the awful old horror palace. It was all he had ever known. He dreamed of the high Nott perch above all the rest, secure behind their wards, nestled among their monstrous safeguards. 

Theodore was homesick. A painful affliction for a wizard. 

His travels took him South. He worked for a time at a Moroccan school of Arithmancy, toiling as a teacher. Then he went in an Easterly direction. He taught Dark Magic to clever scions of the desert, who laughed at the mystery and inhumanity of such a depressed, pale creature. Then he went further and further still, still half-hating everyone around him, for they were often half-breeds and Muggleborns and, more importantly, they were not at all like the people of his home. And his great-uncle had made him, you see, rather miserable and afraid of such things, which was a pity, for Theodore could have been more. He was clever, and quick, and had a good steady duelist’s hand. But he had chosen his home and his blood, always, and now this brought him pain. He longed to return to home, but could not, so instead he searched out high gloomy peaks and awful dark places.

He resolved to climb the highest peak in the world. Given his Nott breeding, he had long believed that he and his existed in a lofty place, atop the rest of humanity, who were buried like ancient cephalopods beneath layers of poverty and muck and bad blood. So, if he was to die, and he could not die in England, then at least he would die above the rest. That was only fitting, only right.

Unfortunately, he was rescued by a fairy.


	3. Chapter 3

It is altogether more accurate to say that the person who rescued Theodore Nott merely  _looked_  like a fairy, to him. For you see he’d been reared up in the Nott fashion; to him, women were either mothers or very still and lovely decorative statues, and when they could not be either, they naturally had to become fairies, inexplicable quirks of nature that the brain could not process.

So naturally at first he mistook Dawa Lhamo for a kind of mountain fairy, an inhuman being, merely decorative.

Dawa Lhamo (who he called simply Lhamo) had no caste. This was odd, for her country could in some ways be as comfortingly and beautifully stratified as Theodore’s own. But not so for her. She was simply the witch of her town, a rebellious creature who had never  _quite_  abided by clan rules. So really  _simply_  was the wrong word entirely. There was nothing simple about being a mountain witch, a witch skilled in fighting off doom and gloom, who could ascend to tremendous heights to rescue even the most foolish English climbers, then who dropped them off to recover at home while she went to fortify town borders with powerful wards, to find homes for refugees far less lucky than Theodore himself, to meet with Muggles in business suits to bargain for schools and tools and rights.

She was a leader. And as she stepped around him later that day — complaining about how foolish he was, how annoying it was to have such a sick person cluttering up her house — he began to suspect, with a sinking feeling, that to classify her as merely decorative would make him as foolish as his own father, who had been ever-unable to appreciate Theodore’s mother; indeed, who’d mistaken the woman for a vase or an end table several times, as was the Nott way with a wife.

But here Theodore was not a Nott. Just a moron who’d attempted Everest with only his wand, and not a very good wand at that.

Lhamo found him very stupid. He found that she had very clear silver laughter, that she was incredibly powerful, that she loved music and could tell the best jokes. He began to suspect that in Amortentia he would smell fresh mountain air, clean linens. In short, he fell in love. He had little to attract her to him, of course. But a clever wizard can make something out of nothing, so he did. He met with foreign Muggles in business suits, speaking their language, appearing as one of their own, to win schools and tools and rights. He helped set wards. He did this even for local Muggles, which was downright puzzling to him, for he still did not like Muggles very much, and indeed he was still a proper pureblood in all the worst ways. It was only that he was a pureblood in love. 

She reciprocated, in time. They married.

Then the letter came. 

Now, Theodore’s father had not been having a hard time of it, exactly, in spite of his prison sentence. He was a Nott of Naughtsden, so he had merely traded one prison — of blood purity and curses and awful wards — for another, with cells and guards and the roaring ocean all around. Minister Shacklebolt had no truck with Dementors and no love for the degree of prison cruelty that had existed before the war, so Nott the elder was not even suffering very much; to live miserable and depressed and lofty and alone had always been, after all, the Nott way. So he bore Azkaban well, and was given visitors’ rights for good behavior, and he pressed Shacklebolt to permit a visit, just one visit, from his son. Shacklebolt did permit it.

So off to England Theodore went, feeling strangely torn to leave the cold, clean mountain, looking back, childlike, confused, at the girlish figure that waved him away, one hand on her belly. 

He was happy to be able to see England again. Of course he was. But he could not shake the feeling that he ought to be  _happier_. It wasn’t simply that he would have to break the news of his marriage to his father (he was not sure Lhamo’s blood was completely pure, for on her mountaintop such a question made people laugh at you and proclaim you a dullard). It was more that he was trading one heart’s pain for another, accepting again old England with its gloomy hauteur, but suddenly and inexplicably consumed with heartache for the laughing loftiness of Lhamo and her mountain. Still, he went. He took a broom then a train then the floo then a broom then  _two_  trains, then Apparated, then sat for three hours huddled in a miserable boat. And in Azkaban, sitting proud, with his ashen grey skin sagging all around his eyes, was his father.

"Marriage?" his father said.

"Marriage," Theodore confirmed. "But to a witch of such heights!"

"Any children yet?" his father said.

And Theodore, who sometimes found it hard to communicate issues of blood and family to his wife, and so who never ever discussed such things with her, said, “No, no.”

He described Lhamo, her dreams for a school, her Muggles in their suits, but though he spun such beautiful fancies of the high blue mountain where she lived, his father’s mind remained mired in the muck and dirt, thinking only of gloomy things, of blood and old fossils’ curses. When the visit was over, his father bade Theodore to spend one night — just one night — at Naughtsden. Shacklebolt would allow this, he was sure.

"And, for me, that I may know you will have pleasant dreams," he told him, "High dreams, my son. Lofty dreams. Promise you will take a dram of a thin and wholesome potion, which your great-uncle Nott kept in a green vial, behind the maple door."

Theodore agreed. He passed out of the cell, down the long grey hallway, and into the boat. He secured permission from Shacklebolt’s people for one night — just one night! — but even as he did so he felt peculiar, for it occurred to him that he did not  _want_  one night, not really. He wanted very badly, all of a sudden, to return to his wife. He had seen his grey father sagging in Azkaban, in a cell high above the rest, and the sight had shaken him, as though for once immense heights might mean nothing. What a thoroughly discomfiting and un-Nott-like idea  _that_  was!

But he did as he was asked. He went to Naughtsden. The wind whistled around the old fortress, the wards trembled at his touch, the horrors his uncle had hidden just out of sight moaned and shook, but did not harm him, for they would not harm a Nott. He found he had to light the braziers — odd, the dark had never bothered him before — for the place had become strange and ghostly, moreso than before. The cold here was not a clean and fresh thing, as it was near Everest. It pricked him as he walked from corridor to corridor. He had been heartsick for this place for so long. But now reality intruded, and showed him that it was just another prison, really, and instead he became heartsick for his wife. He resolved to go to bed at once, so that the morning might come quicker, and before he did he remembered his promise. He fetched the green vial. He quaffed it.

At no time has it  _ever_  been legal to mix Amortentia with that juice which ghostly wails deem cursed hebenon. At no time. But this does not mean that wizards, furious to discover that their heirs might succumb to muck and filth, have never done it. 

And nine times out of ten this eliminates the contagion at the source.

Theodore dreamed of cool mountain air and clean linens and a creature like a fairy, but far more real. And he did not awaken from the dream. He simply slipped away into it, his heartsickness dancing around the edge of his thoughts.

When Shacklebolt’s men came to collect him in the morning, they were in for a surprise. It did not occur to them to alert his wife about it. They hadn’t even bothered to ask him if he had a wife. So then nine months passed without Theodore returning to Lhamo, and then one more, for good measure.

Lhamo was, predictably, upset.

"Where are you going?" asked the people of her town.

"To his awful little country," she said, with the baby on her back and a kind of merry, bitter danger in her eye. "And when I find him, I’m going to  _curse_  him.”

Lhamo was not afraid to leave her mountain range. Lhamo was a witch of the Himalayas. She knew she could well withstand even English cold and English fear and the sensation one had in strange new places, that the air was too thin, that all was wrong.

And yet when this feeling crept over her in England itself, it seemed much harder to fight than before. Because the fear here was not understandable, like the fear of the Everest mountain climber. Fear in England it was a gloomy, slithering, choking thing that snuck up on her when frightened Muggles described the awful place on the hill, the lofty cursed place, the demons’ castle.

Naughtsden. 


	4. Chapter 4

All around the base of Naughtsden’s hill was a Muggle city buzzing with activity. Muggles had encroached on the superior Nott grounds. They’d built very very tall skyscrapers and dug deep deep tunnels for piping and sewage and things like that. As though they had no care for up and down and old and new. But they had a terrible fear of the Bluebeard castle on the mountain. The people in their skycrapers turned away their faces if their windows should open onto the sight of it, and the constabulary posted sentinels all around the forbidding structure, for when children or the indigent slipped onto the mountain they never, ever came back. But in fact the sentinels  _also_  rarely came back. And those in the  _know_ , who had some inkling of a world beyond theirs, had long tried to communicate with Minister Shacklebolt over it. But he was high up in the Ministry, and they down in the Muggle world, and through some twisty magic laid down by that old Puck Cantankerus, their missives were always lost before they reached him.

So they had no hope until Lhamo came.

She, too, had tried to communicate with Shacklebolt’s people first. But she did not like or trust them. They never ever bothered with basic translating spells when speaking to her — she had to do the translation charms all on her own — for to them it was only natural that she should speak English and Latin and nothing else, and they would not learn any charms to try and speak  _her_  language. Moreover, they spoke endlessly of their world and their Quidditch teams and Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts. And if she should say that Theodore had come to live on her mountain instead of a British one, they regarded it as a kind of death sentence. And the baby they looked on with pity, for, born on a mountain and meant to be raised there by an exiled parent, it could never go to Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts.

"Oh, but we are working on our own school," said Lhamo. "And schools for the Muggles, besides!"

And the wizards of Britain sneered to hear it, that someone with so little was attempting charity for others, and also that she seemed to think her school might match Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts.

So it made sense, to Lhamo, to turn instead to the Muggles. They could be as petty and small as wizards. But when it came to the matter of finding Theodore, they were far more sensible and helpful, though they were also terrified. More and more sentinels in blue shirts with silly black batons were disappearing inside Naughtsden. The fortress was like a great dragon chained in the center of the city, demanding tribute, swallowing people whole before every sunrise. So no one wanted to go near it anymore.

Lhamo volunteered. She had to find Theodore. And she knew things that the Muggles did not. She was a witch of the Himalayas. When she saw wards laid out in a cunning spiderweb from a low low plain all the way up to a great peak, she understood well how to dismantle them. For she laid wards just like that at home. So she took apart Nott’s cursed wards with ease. Then she approached Naughtsden itself.

There was a damp and horrible whistling wind up near the castle, that seemed to carry with it forbidden diseases, sicknesses of the heart and mind and body, and she felt a strong sense of foreboding. Four paths led to the door, lined up behind four statues, which made sense, for the people here loved the number four, for the four houses of Hogwarts Hogwarts Hogwarts. The statues were a grimacing man with a book (my heir Nott, Ravenclaw), and a grimacing man with a cauldron (my heir Nott, Hufflepuff), and a grimacing man with a sword (my heir Nott, Gryffindor), and then a destroyed statue with its long legs smashed and its merry face blown to pieces, with only a carved duelist’s hand and wand surviving intact. And this one was no heir, which was odd, for the people here were obsessed with heirs and blood. Someone had removed its plaque and branded it M U G G L E L O V E R. 

Well, these were keyed to wards, she knew. And she could tell that the first three were the safer options. They hummed with creeping kinds of magic, the kind that might let you in if you only answered a riddle, or sang a song. Whereas the fourth was all destroyed, and those who chose it clearly chose it at their peril, for the Notts of Naughtsden had no love for Muggle-lovers. But, you see, where Lhamo was from,  _everyone_  was a Muggle-lover from the English perspective. It was customary to interact with the Muggles, to keep abreast of their world. It was something she had done all her life. Still, it would be insensible to declare herself a Muggle-lover and face whatever horrors the fourth path had in store. There was the baby to consider, after all.

But then she also had to consider that at any moment you could betray your culture and your values — Theodore seemed to have done it simply by marrying  _her_ , silly as that was — and if you did it once, it would be easier to do it again and again and again, and what kind of lesson was that, to impart to her child? So she took the fourth path. And immediately from below roared the curses laid into the foundations, and horrible screaming vines with sick-smelling purple flowers attacked her, and it took all her strength and quickness to evade them, and she thought she would die.

But she did not. She heard a kind of easy laugh, very genial. And when she turned she saw at her back a man like a fairy, handsome, with very dark skin and quick duelist’s reflexes, and he was protecting the baby.

"Lhamo," Geoffrey said. "You will have to spend three nights here. Take up a post here at the door and I will protect you for the first night. For the second, you will need to command another’s help."

 _Command_. That was odd. An odd word. But very like the wizards here, she thought, to say command when probably they only meant  _ask_.

Still, Lhamo did as she was bade. She and the baby spent the night at the door, where the whistling winds and the awful cursed flowers attacked them, and all the night long she and Geoffrey did battle. Until in the morning Geoffrey disappeared, and so too did the foundation curses, for they had vanquished them utterly. Then she went in.

Anyone who has been inside a fine old magical castle can attest that after a time they all begin to look the same: the same immense floo, the same eerie portraits, the same hidden passageways and vaulted stone halls and macabre tapestries showing ancestors cheerfully massacring goblins. Only to Lhamo it all looked so evil and foreign, she could not help but repress a shudder, and she thought that the baby was very lucky to be mostly sleeping through it. She searched endless rooms. Hidden rooms, rooms inside rooms, rooms of glass where dead plants sat in sad bunches all around, rooms with stuffed elf heads, rooms full of cabinets of bloodstained wands. This was only the outer castle.

When she reached the inner rooms, beyond the great staircase, it was late in the day, and she began to feel again that sense of foreboding. She found herself in a room with curious blood in jars and bones in glass cases, a kind of library, and here were pickled brains labeled  _Muggle; inferior_ , and delicate wristbones and wands in silken boxes.  _Mrs. Malfoy, the greatest of her people_. And a portrait of Cantankerus Nott sneering down. And books. So many, often with horrible pictures of dissections in them, that charted out a vertical history: from the low and apish and foreign and Muggle, to the great and superior and English and Nott.

Except for one. Mr. Turpin’s. All about Muggle skyscrapers. And high places in the Nepalese and Tibetan mountains, where people were struggling to find ways of passing on ancient knowledge, of making it new. And other perfectly normal and wonderful developments all around the world, in Africa and in America and in Australia, and in places which came near the end of the alphabet, too: Yemen and Vietnam and so on. And even very secret places which belonged to the werewolves and veela. This book seemed unconcerned with high or low; it was a horizontal book, with many different things all laid out on the same plane, each examined for their good traits. Little wonder Lhamo enjoyed it more than anything else in the room. 

But she should not have picked it up. For at first she was so engrossed in translating it, poring it over, that she did not notice the lengthening shadows, the way ghastly bits of bone began to reassemble themselves into walking horrors, how the brains and blood in the jars suddenly began to ooze out and paint the floor. And how Cantankerus Nott, dozing above the fireplace, opened his eyes, and his horrible sagging skin looked even more monstrous than before, and his long gruesome fingers grasped the edge of the frame, and out he climbed. She screamed, and dropped the book. He loomed over her horribly, all near-seven feet of him, with his shock of white hair and his terrible dripping white skin, a great bleached dinosaur. And again, she thought she was going to die.

But then she remembered.  _You will need to command another’s help._

"Stop that!" Lhamo commanded. 

This echo of Catankerus Nott lurched horribly, a massive ancient specimen suddenly confronted by five feet of stubborn Himalayan modernity. It bared its little teeth behind the thin lips, lifted a hand so that the blood jumped up from the floor and began to coat the walls, bade the skeletons to rattle, the wristbones with their wand to silently  _Imperio_ , to  _Crucio_. Lhamo, who had evaded death daily on high peaks since she was very small, blocked and dodged. And before the business could progress to  _Avada Kedavra_ , she stepped down hard on the relict’s foot.

He gave an offended yowl, coincidentally not unlike the howls and roars he had given in life. Lhamo was not sure what to do next, so she simply went with her gut. She kneed him. Down he went. And then she sat on him. There was no rhyme or reason to this behavior; it simply made sense. It put him beneath her. And she was beginning to suspect that the fairy rules of this place operated vertically. Those beneath were subject to those above.  

He continued yowling all that evening and all through the night, but nothing else attacked her. She refused to move, even when he woke the baby and the baby yowled with him. And in the morning, the library was set to rights; all the evils of the night, including old Cantankerus, vanished.

But she still had one more night here. Exhausted, she combed over every inch of the inner castle. Until it was quite boring to her. She could have sworn she’d passed that painting seven times. She had the elf heads near-memorized. The high glass windows, rattled by the wind, seemed to her like very tiresome town busybodies, mundane and stupid, who would not let one alone. Her only remotely interesting companions were the ghosts of rats, creeping about gazing mournfully at the crumbs that fell from the food she’d packed. She became quite used to the place, and could not find the slightest clue as to Theodore’s whereabouts.

After night fell once more, she discovered a wooden door, set inside a small hallway she must have overlooked until just then. She opened it. Anticlimactic. It was only a storeroom. A low table, a chair in the corner, shelves of potions on the walls. She would have turned around and gone back out again, but for one thing. Theodore’s wand was on the table. She would recognize it anywhere, for he had certainly complained about it often enough. And next to it was a half-empty vial. Lhamo sniffed it experimentally. It smelled like her husband.

This made no sense. Why would Theodore leave his wand behind? He was a perfect mooncalf. But he was not  _this_  stupid. Lhamo shifted the baby to her back, secure and snug in his pack, and inspected the clues. She could make neither heads nor tails of them. She retreated to a corner to think, putting one hand on the wall. But this corner had an awful surprise. The wall inverted, flipped inwards, and Lhamo shrieked and fell forward on her belly, careening down a dark tunnel, faster and faster, as though she’d misstepped, back home on the mountains, and was now falling to her doom. But of course she was prepared for eventualities like  _that_. She had the foresight to cast a cushioning spell. When she and the baby emerged on the other side, they bounced harmlessly on air, then floated down.

They were  _down_  now. No longer in the lofty castle peaks, but firmly ensconced inside the mountain. In the Nott family crypt, in fact, where fossilized Notts had for generations collected dust. Where Theodore was collecting dust, on a slab, his eyes closed, a strange smile on his lips. All around them, the other slabs shifted, their tops came undone. Long long gruesome bony fingers began to reach out of them. Frightened, Lhamo rushed to Theodore. 

She saw in his hands three new vials.

One was the juice of crushed purple flowers; another the henbane which at home they used to treat coughs, but which in great quantities was poisonous; the third? Not really a vial at all. More a perfume bottle. It did not look like it belonged. It also did not look remotely helpful. Silly, Muggle craftsmanship, something entirely out of place, making a mockery of the situation. Lhamo disregarded it and selected the first vial, unsure of what to do. Cautiously she poured a drop on the floor, and it made a great crack spring up, nearly throwing her off her feet, and from the crack came shades like old Cantankerus, massive earth giants with sagging faces. Terrified, Lhamo dropped down the second bottle, and the very air became suffused with a horrible feeling, like heartache, and she felt as though she were being choked and poisoned by the heavy smell of it.

Not knowing what else to do, she spritzed, just once, the perfume bottle.

And heard a voice in her ear. 

It was a laughing voice —  _such_  a laughing voice, with music in it — and Lhamo thought she could see a very beautiful fairy, with black skin and beaded skirts, appear before her. “It’s about time,” said the fairy. “Do you know? Theodore could have summoned me himself, but then he had to go and listen to his father and now look what’s become of him. You ought to talk to him when he wakes up. These pure British boys can be so silly.

"But don’t be afraid! Simply climb up on the slab — yes, with the baby, there you go. And they will not harm you as long as you pay them no heed. They’re ancient values now revealed to be monstrous, that’s all. And they  _will_  give one heartache. But you must try to endure it! And I will be with you the whole time.”

And in fact Jenny was.

In the morning Theodore awoke. He was extremely out of sorts. And it did not help that the first thing his wife did was hex him (the second was to introduce him to the baby). He stumbled up out of the crypt with her, to the surface, where the edge of the mountain met the low plain of the Muggle city. There was a very irritable Ministry personage there.

"Alright there, Nott," they said. "What do you think you’ve been doing, disappearing and then reappearing. And — hang on! Who’s that with you? You too! Alright there, both of you! Wait. Is that a  _baby_?”

Lhamo blinked. She did not like this person’s manner of address. She did not bother to cast a translation charm. She merely gave him a cool stare.

Luckily, there was a bushy-haired young woman at his elbow. She said, “Ron! Can’t you see she doesn’t understand you? Honestly, it ought to occur to you to cast a translation charm—”

"Hermione, then why can’t  _she_  cast a translation charm?”

"I’ll cast a translation charm," said Theodore tiredly.

Ron gaped at him. Hermione, refusing to be outdone by Theodore Nott of all people, hastily cast a translation charm. She said, “Excuse me, but we’re here from the Minister, and— Why, I’m speaking Sherpa! Hang on,  _do_  they call it Sherpa? Or is it listed as some variant of Nepali? Oh, I have to research this more fully.”

"Now I don’t know what you’re saying," Ron complained. 

"Why doesn’t he just cast a translation charm?" Lhamo demanded, not sure what he was complaining about.

"They don’t teach them at Hogwarts and he doesn’t study so he never learned them properly, and also he’s very stubborn," Hermione said. "It’s something we’re working on. We’re getting him therapy, actually."

By now Ron had cast a translation charm. He said, “We’re getting both of us therapy. It’s marriage counseling. That means therapy for  _both_  of us.”

"Yes, and  _I_  am doing splendidly at it and have never once turned in a late assignment,” his wife said primly.

Theodore snorted in a somewhat superior fashion to hear it. His wife eyed him. She said icily, “You know, marriage counseling doesn’t seem like a bad idea.”


	5. Chapter 5

Now, when Lhamo — impure of blood, foreign in every way — survived three nights in the cursed castle of Naughtsden, it had a peculiar effect on old Cantankerus’s surviving spells. Though in many ways his damage was done and could not be taken back, though Muggle sentinels would remain lost, though the wizards and witches Cantankerus had trampled still lived with their slights, his blood wards collapsed and his skeletal horrors went again to their rest. In the Ministry, Kingsley Shacklebolt, just stepping in for the morning and hanging up his loose coat, was deluged with a flurry of letters from the floo all of a sudden, missives from the Muggle world, all describing the horrors which Naughtsden had imposed on the surrounding country. 

So naturally he did what any sensible Minister would do. He dispatched an auror deperate to prove himself, along with a driven and professional attache, to get the facts. They did not make the world’s most flawless marriage, true. But they could be trusted to report back with accuracy and insight, for they did make a rather good  _team_. So Shacklebolt was perhaps less surprised than he ought to have been when not only did they hand him an eyewitness and survivor of Cantankerus’s curses, but they also dropped the long-missing Theodore Nott (MLE Watchlist, no. 34) in his lap.

Shacklebolt had assumed Nott had found a way to hole up inside his mountain, to keep himself from being extradited. 

"I’m afraid the holing up was unintentional on my part," Nott said. He looked much different from the last time Shacklebolt had seen him. His pale, ashen skin was very tight and nervous; he seemed unwilling to let go of his wife. Shacklebolt did not know it, but something in Theodore had irrevocably shifted. He had so long seen the world in Nott terms — himself high above, and others far below. But when he’d ascended his ancestral mountain and quaffed without thinking the poison his fathers fed him, it had only dropped him into a kind of death-sleep deep in the earth, consigned him to life as a buried thing, a worthless mud creature. And — worse — he had abandoned Lhamo, and his child. Unthinkingly, perhaps. But he had still done it. And if Lhamo had not come to rescue him, then who knew? Perhaps his folly would have been visited on the baby, made him heartsick and unhappy, growing up thinking his father did not want him.

Theodore realized, just then, that many of the things he’d once valued were quite worthless. Empty. Total value of all his lofty, superior heartsickness? Zero. Naught.

"You know full well the punishment handed out to the Notts—" Shacklebolt was saying.

"I do. And I’ll obey it," Theodore said. "But I’d just as soon not be a Nott anymore. I’m casting off the name. I’ll be a Sherpa instead."

This was Ron Weasley’s cue. Listening just around the office door, he ducked his head in, looking  _thrilled_ , and said, “Wait. Seriously?” 

His wife pulled him back out before Lhamo’s hex could do serious damage.

"Sorry," Lhamo said, not sounding sorry at all.

"Really? Why?" they heard Hermione Granger call out.

So all in all Theodore’s second extradition proved to be rather anticlimactic, after the horror story he and Lhamo had endured. But that is often the way, isn’t it? Shacklebolt thought so. The great horrors of the past give way to calm, more often than not. To recovery. Slow recovery, perhaps. And unfairly distributed — sometimes those most victimized receive the least of it. But still. Still, after all that. Cantankerus Nott’s evil was to have a fitting end: it, and the man himself, and in fact the whole family name, was in the span of thirty years forgotten.

Which did not mean Shacklebolt was not keeping an eye on Theodore Nott. He was. Or, more accurately, since he could not very well overstep international bounds and spy on wizards abroad, he was keeping track of the Nott finances, which Cantankerus had so faithfully built up years before, with a dig at an Abbott there, an ousting of a Longbottom here. And yet, little by little, this money trickled out of England. It was invested in strange efforts to teach far-off mountaineers, the nonmagical ones who could not resort to casting interpretive charms, to read and write. It was invested in hospitals. It came to light when certain people sought to invalidate a marriage, citing Sherpa clan rules; and yet it was also used several times to uphold clan rules against outsider tradition.

It left England utterly with the founding of the new school. This was a massive investment. Kingsley heard about it very often, for a new magical school had not come about in a very long time, and this one was ambitious indeed. Magical folk across Britain were quite sure it would fail, but in fact it produced the enchanter Pemba, whose power became renowned and whose wisdom was spoken of with reverence. It preserved old old local magic, but fearlessly combined it with ever-new techniques and teachings. The school sent envoys across the world, to schools in Borneo and Brooklyn and even nearby Bangladesh. It was said to be a lofty bone palace, a place built of bleached and ancient tissues, magical substances dug up from the earth, but treated with reverence and care and then? Elevated to the clouds.

And of course one day, many years later, Jenny Shacklebolt tripped downstairs and said excitedly that her application had been accepted. 

"For what?" said her father.

"Study abroad," Jenny said, as though the term were not a ludicrous Muggle import that had little relevance in her world.

Her father blinked at her. Her mother blinked at her. Her half-nephew, Teddy, said, “Wooooooh,  _boy,_ " because he’d recently fallen into Muggle phraseology himself. 

But Jenny was to have her way, and in any case the Headmistress of this new school was very very highly spoken of, and she’d selected Jenny from all the applicants personally, and that was no small thing. And it was rare that spaces opened up in such a highly-regarded academy. And besides, how could Kingsley deny her a chance at a year in such a special place, a magical place, a school floating high above the peaks of Everest?

-

Dear Mum and Dad,  
This place is not like Hogwarts in that it is much more experiential, and Headmistress Lhamo always intended it to be very involved in the affairs of the surrounding countryside. It is not a separate place on a mountain. They always asks us to address the needs of the people nearby.

So this is my roundabout way of saying that yesterday we went down into the jungles and rescued baby  **tigers**!

Ha. Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

I know everyone says tigers are just regular animals and not magical animals and therefore who cares, but the distinction is stupid. First of all, they are related to chimeras and sphinxes through their cousin, the lion, and second of all they have real personality, even the babies, and their own good traits. So I think instead of classifying the sphinxes up in the heavens of magical zoology, and saying we shouldn’t worry about the poaching of those dirty tigers, we should instead think about the tigers and sphinxes as on the same level and try to protect them both if we can. Tell Hagrid I said so, it’s just my 2 knuts. 

Oh & the boy who had my room here before me has gone to America for a year. But he was some kind of dueling champion with the most wonderful collection of antique wands and things, his father is big on not relying on one wand too much and anyway the people here have always used other things to channel their magic so the bond between wizard and wand is not so important here. But! He locked up his cabinet & I can’t get at them to try them out, which is a shame because dueling is my favorite class. I may Owl him. I mean send a bar-headed goose because owls can’t reach me. It’s not the right climate for them.   
Love,  
Jenny

-

Dear Jenny,  
Yes, of course. The keys to the wards are with my mother, I’ve told her to show you how it goes. 

Also thanks so much for writing in Nepali. No one here ever translates anything. I have to do the translation charms myself, and then they all compliment me on my English and asked how I learned it, to cover up their own rudeness. But otherwise the Armistead Institute is wonderful. I’m learning magic that is somewhat close to voodoo. Voodoo’s really not as bad as it’s been painted internationally, in the last century it turns out there has been a group really pushing to get it used to get justice for specific wrongs in a way that counterbalances the evil, which is interesting. History & law & politics & culture all colliding, sort of.

Yes, I do know Professor Zabini. He says he prefers the American South to Hogwarts but that this doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss you and wants to know if you will apply to Armistead at some point. He is a real lounging gentleman of a teacher, I can see why you would like him. Classrooms bore him so we head out to do more fascinating things; three days ago, we went down to a swamp because they had found the bones of an ancient dinosaur lying there, but they crackled with a kind of magic which no dinosaur ever has as far as I know. Professor Zabini stood there in a three-piece suit, making sure the muck of the thing didn’t touch him, and said that 1. this will be revolutionary since it’s definitive proof that magic really can show up anywhere, and 2. it’s completely unsurprising that the first wizards were sharp-toothed Saurian reptiles.  

One thing I want to mention which may seem odd — are you related to a Jenny Jinks, by any chance? She won the prize I am going for this year, the Laveau, and there is a picture of her in this beautiful little chamber they have here that smells of a kind of perfume, and next to it some facts, it says she married a Shacklebolt. I tasked my mother & she said to ask you, I asked my father & he said that we had the honor once of being very personally cursed by her so that we would someday be quite as good as her descendants.

I don’t know about a curse. If you are one of these descendants it sounds like a blessing to me.  
Pemba Jangbu Sherpa

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The American wizarding school was intended to be named for James Armistead, black patriot spy, but if your brain went instead to Lewis Armistead, white Confederate general, that's fine too. The Muggles' US is varied in that respect; I can't see why the magical US should be any different.


End file.
